As a child young Déodat showed considerable intellectual potential and special interest in the natural surroundings of his home in the Alps of southeastern France.

He spent his spare time taking scientific excursions throughout Europe collecting mineral specimens and visiting mining areas.

Although Dolomieu was greatly interested in volcanoes, he became convinced that water played a major role in shaping the surface of the Earth through a series of prehistoric, catastrophic events.

Unlike Hutton, no scientific principles or theories are credited to him, although he left his permanent mark on geology in another way: that is by discovering the mineral dolomite that would be named after him.

[2] During one of his voyages to the Alps of Tyrol (today part of northeastern Italy) Dolomieu discovered a calcareous rock which, unlike limestone, did not effervesce with weak hydrochloric acid.

[4] In his book Oryctographia Carniola, oder physikalische Erdbeschreibung des Herzogthums Krain, Istrien und zum Theil der benachbarten Länder, published by Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf in 1778, the Austrian naturalist Belsazar Hacquet also observed this distinction between limestone and a rock that Hacquet described as lapis suillus.

In 1795, having lost his fortune in the revolution, Dolomieu accepted the position of professor of natural sciences at the École Centrale Paris and started to write the mineralogical section of the Encyclopédie Méthodique.

By 1798 De Dolomieu had developed an international reputation as one of the leading geologists in the world and was invited to join the scientific expedition accompanying Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt, as part of the natural history and physics section of the Institut d'Égypte.

Dolomieu had previously made a powerful enemy of the grand master of the Maltese order when he helped negotiate the surrender of the island of Malta to Napoleon.

The grand master denounced Dolomieu and he was transferred to Messina, Sicily, and imprisoned under horrible conditions, in solitary confinement, for the next 21 months.

In the spring of 1800 Napoleon led the French army into Italy, delivering a crushing blow to the Austrians and their Italian allies on 14 June at the Battle of Marengo.